#1 in fundraising among Democrats.
#1 in fundraising among Democrats. SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

Thursday morning Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign team was pleased to announce a $34.5 million haul for the last quarter of fundraising, bringing the Vermont Senator's total up to nearly $100 million for the year, according to the New York Times.

Sanders's quarterly numbers top the Democratic field, beating Mayor Pete Buttigieg by nearly $10 million, Joe Biden by nearly $12 million, Andrew Yang by $18 million (though the fact that Yang pulled in $16.5 million in three months is pretty wild), and Tulsi Gabbard by $31 million. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker have yet to release their fourth-quarter numbers, though Warren's goal was to raise $20 million. While the President raised $46 million last quarter, the combined Democratic total dwarfs that, suggesting that the blue team's donors—both very big and very small—will keep up with the incumbent's numbers and happily dump a pile of money on whomever the party chooses as its nominee.

With 40,000 new donors, an average donation of $18.50, and practically zero donors maxing out, Sanders will likely maintain his extremely high and extremely steady numbers as 2020 continues apace.

Bernie's blowout comes a few weeks after the media and "Democratic insiders" started taking his candidacy seriously. The day after Christmas, Politico reported that former Clinton and Obama staffers were "suddenly" considering the fact that Sanders might win the nomination. The week before the magazine painted a portrait of what a Sanders administration would look like, which doesn't look too bad to me. Neither do his day-one priorities:

He would sign executive orders that extend legal status to 1.8 million young people currently eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and provide protections to their parents and other undocumented immigrants. He would stop construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and he has said he would convene a “hemispheric summit” to address migration.

Sanders says his attorney general would open a criminal investigation into the fossil fuel industry, litigating over climate change as the government once did to the tobacco industry over smoking. He would use his executive authority to ban offshore drilling and fossil fuel extraction on public lands, and to revoke federal permits for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

He would direct his administration to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, and he would end American support for the war in Yemen.

But enough daydreaming. High fundraising numbers don't portend victory—just ask 2003-era Howard Dean.

Plus, with a month until caucusing and primary voting begins, Sanders still trails Biden by 9 points in the national polls. Iowa and New Hampshire are toss-ups, Biden's maintaining his lead in South Carolina and Nevada, and California is anyone's game. Paths to victory are imaginable for the top four candidates, and nobody knows what's going to happen yet in the Democratic primary, except for maybe Marianne Williamson.

Sanders's impressive fundraising numbers, however, might end the "Bernie Blackout" and finally draw more "scrutiny" from the media, though his campaign has proved pretty resilient to plenty of scrutiny so far.

Among many other criticisms, Sanders has been called a hypocrite for being a millionaire who rails against billionaires, a sexist for having sexist supporters and for initially dismissing sexual harassment claims coming from women who worked on his 2016 campaign, a radical Socialist for supporting the Sandinistas in the 1980s, a spoiler for not dipping out of 2016 earlier, and who could forget that time Jeremy Corbyn's huge loss foreshadowed Sanders's own downfall? And none of that is to mention that Buzzfeed published Clinton's entire oppo file on Sanders back in 2016. So far, none of it has really stuck.